Visa, MasterCard Looking Into Online Targeted Advertising Using Credit-Card Data | Hacker News Reader

Visa, MasterCard Looking Into Online Targeted Advertising Using Credit-Card Data

online.wsj.com

60 pointsssclafani24 comments

Here's something immediately useful for those who can't be arsed reading the whole article:

> People can remove their information from MasterCard's analysis by providing their card number on the "Data Analytics Opt-Out" page at www.mastercard.us/privacy.

There are three different opt-outs available (roughly "stop tracking my browser", "stop tracking my email", and "stop tracking my card"), and apart from a CAPTCHA, it's really very frictionless to opt-out.

Now time to read into how exactly they define "opting out" and what that entails to me and my data.

EDIT: apparently, they're serving those opt-out forms via Akamai, so I get a lovely "SSL Error" page in Chrome when I hard type the "https". Cute.

Now all we need is the link for Visa.

I can't seem to be able to click the "opt out" button here: http://www.mastercard.us/privacy/web-analytics-opt-out.html

And the fact that the data analytics page doesn't default to HTTPS is a slap in the face.

I wonder what they'd do if someone wrote a script to opt out every possible MasterCard number.

> I wonder what they'd do if someone wrote a script to opt out every possible MasterCard number.

I suppose that's what that pitiful CAPTCHA is in place against!

Every trend in history has that seminal event that defined the future to come... If our spending habits are opened to advertising interests, I would consider that such an event and the beginning of a nasty slippery slope with unexpected consequences down the road for all of us.

This scares me.

If our spending habits are opened to advertising interests

It already is, all over the place. Login to Amazon and take a look at the suggested products. It's just that it's typically done on a store by store basis, and doesn't encompass every single purchase you make.

But Amazons data is also not directly associated with your credit card but is to your shopping and browsing history on the site.

Correct me if I'm wrong though but today only the stores see the products we buy, where as the credit card companies see only what we spend at each store. The combination is much more scary.

Not the same thing.

In the past, before the Internet, the shopkeeper knew my purchasing history.

The bank didn't know or care what I did with my cash.

> for instance, a weight-loss ad to a person who just swiped their card at a fast-food chain

This isn't always accurate. I know people with anorexia who buy diet products at the UK store "Boots", and who use their loyalty cards when they do so. Boots then sends them information about weight-loss plans; slimming medication; and so on. One can imagine similar happening with alcoholics.

And I'd be interested to see how legal this is in Europe. It seems to be a clear breach of data protection laws.

> It seems to be a clear breach of data protection laws.

If the customer consents to the collection and use of the data it is within the current European law. All they would need to do is get consent when signing up for, or renewing a card.

When banks were first founded, there was a big hoo-ha over how much of an insight they had into people's private lives. After the hoo-ha, lots of strict regulations were put in place governing what could be done with the data.

Looks like we're back there again.

Got any specifics on that? I'm curious.

Banks were first founded in the 17th/18th century, FWIW.

I've tried, but I can't find the reference.

Nice, now I learnt to no longer buy 'private' stuff with the cards. I'll warn other people with this article.

They FUD'd themselves unnecessarily.

FWIW it's been a rule of thumb since, well, always not to buy private stuff with your credit card. Issuer banks and sometimes the CC networks themselves are constantly profiling you in order to better assess the risk you pose (and in turn how much credit you ought to have).

The more organisations turn to advertising to monetize their products and services, the more valuable products and services without advertising will become.

They're also going to be selling off real-time feeds of per-company sales data to investors:

MasterCard has launched a new product for investors leveraging its huge global panel of transaction data from over 1.7B cards. This panel is global, more representative, more timely (weekly data to get ahead of monthly comps) and more customizable than any other transactional database available to the buy-side.

There is a broad range of topics on which we can provide investors with timely insights with actual sales transactions. Here are just a few samples of the topics we have done work.

• Detailed Macro reads across 14 sectors in the US and 4 in the UK

      •         Department Stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size across segments


      •         Office Supply Stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size for ODP, OMX and SPLS


      •         Home Improvement – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size for HD, LOW, LL and Ace


      •         Consumer Electronics – Total Sales, Transactions segmented by price point (e.g. to get a read on flat-panel/laptop sales)


      •         Other Retailers across a broad range of segments – Total Sales and Transactions


      •         Grocery stores – Total sales, transactions and Avg Basket size


      •         E-Commerce—Segmenting direct v. store sales trends, analysis of e-commerce companies like AMZN, NILE and many others


      •         Hotels – direct vs. OTA bookings/international trends, highly correlative chain hotels RevPar, Vegas-specific hotels


      •         Airlines – forward looking bookings as an indicator of RASM


      •         Cable/Satellite – ARPU, Churn and Total sales

Credit card companies selling their data to BlueKai/Exelate - shudder.

Isn't Google (and MasterCard) already doing this with Google Wallet?

http://google.com/wallet/

Showing "a weight-loss ad to a person who just swiped their card at a fast-food chain" seems like an odd example. I guess it might work, but it strikes me as counterintuitive.

I have no problem with this. I'm all for advertisements being either more entertaining and funny, or more for things that I actually want. It's better than being blasted with stuff that I have no need for, even if they put in pictures of half naked women in it.

problem solved: "disallow third party cookies"

(very easy in firefox, it's a checkbox)

Note to developers - never rely on 3rd party cookies, just like never rely on a referer.

Hmm, time to move to cash or bitcoin?

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